Megan Harper
Financial services are overwhelmed by an abundance of paperwork, compliance checks, and regulatory reporting. Deborah Yang, a veteran in wealth and asset management, saw a better way. With Daizy, she’s bringing AI-driven automation to investment firms, cutting down manual work while keeping everything compliant.
1. What inspired you to create Daizy, and how did your career in financial services shape its mission?
Deborah Yang: Early on, when I was a financial advisor and a start-up leader in cloud computing, I was struck by the limitation of wealth management tools available. After building some of the highest growth innovations at MSCI, a publicly traded decacorn in financial services indexes and tools, I believe there is tremendous innovation possible in wealth and asset management with the advent of AI Agents. In a heavily regulated and specialized vertical, we know deeply that we at Daizy are thrilled by the massive potential for transformation using AI Agents in financial services. Watch this space!
2. Daizy offers a suite of AI Agents tailored for financial services. What key challenges do these solutions address?
Deborah Yang: Financial services often spend their most expensive people on documents that are never read but are required for regulation and compliance. Daizy has a growing range of AI Agents helping the investment sector with its intricate pain points. Examples include 1) the ability to quickly generate customized content and insights at scale, 2) boosting productivity and freeing up capacity within sales and marketing teams, and 3) allowing firms to benefit from the latest technical capabilities that AI agentic innovation offers without suffering from ‘LLM hallucinations.’
3. How does Daizy stand out in the competitive landscape of AI-powered financial platforms?
Deborah Yang: Daizy’s AI Agents produce compliant regulatory content and insights for wealth and investment managers – accurately and in minutes. For example, our clients have benefited from a specific agent to deliver regulatory reporting such as management discussion and analysis (MD&A) for their fund ranges whilst reducing the amount of related labor-intensive tasks. Daizy AI Agents can flexibly deliver customizable outputs like fund commentaries while utilizing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology and institutional-grade data to ensure accuracy. Unlike more general AI providers, our laser focus on the financial services vertical is a differentiator. With our deep industry experience, we are well-positioned to help ensure regulatory compliance is at the center of everything our clients do.
4. Daizy emphasizes the ability to generate compliant-ready financial content. How does the platform ensure accuracy and compliance?
Deborah Yang: With many of us having worked in financial services, we fully understand the industry’s need for compliant and accurate outputs. We use a range of methods to support our client’s efforts, including incorporating guardrails, automatic checks, and training using pre-defined compliance rules; grounding outputs with RAG in real-time, high-quality data to minimize errors; and allowing firms to integrate their own compliance rules and language into the process. In addition, when outputs are generated, they pass through a robust orchestration layer that checks them for accuracy. This is a key area that we will continue to work on due to its importance.
5. Can you share a specific success story where Daizy transformed operations for a client or partner?
Deborah Yang: Our agents amplify human capital and turn regulatory demands into our clients’ competitive edge. In short, we do the work that must be done—and we do it fast! For one client, Daizy’s Financial Writer agent has cut 100 hours per month of manual teamwork to 7 hours.
6. With AI-driven tools like the Hypothetical Portfolio Tool and Competitor Fund Comparison, how does Daizy empower sales teams?
Deborah Yang: The pressure to grow assets, revenues and ROI is intense. To build an edge vs. peers, leveraging Daizy’s AI Agents will help clients stand out in the hyper-competitive market. One example is our automated hypothetical portfolio tool which allows sales teams to showcase the impact of adjusting products in client portfolios, supported by analytics and suggested talking points. We also arm sales and product teams with competitive analysis through in-depth analyses of peer groups and positioning points vs. competing products.
7. Daizy supports marketing, sales, and product teams through AI. How do you ensure seamless integration across these functions?
Deborah Yang: Helping our clients grow is our goal, and we do so by seamlessly embedding Daizy AI Agents with client teams to amplify their impact. We offer flexibility in using Daizy Scribe – either on-platform themselves by using pre-set templates or customizing them; or by working with us on a managed solution for a specific use case. One example of how different teams can work together is the ability to share and edit Daizy Scribe outputs with colleagues in real-time. For implementations, we provide account management and services with hands-on support deployment and close engagement throughout the entire relationship to ensure success.
8. Looking ahead, how do you envision Daizy evolving to meet future needs in wealth and asset management?
Deborah Yang: We want to become the ubiquitous provider of regulatory content and workflow automation in the investment industry. Being at the intersection of AI, industry developments, and demographic change is really exciting and offers so many opportunities to further develop our AI agents. We will continue to respond to actual market needs and rapidly deliver innovative solutions, covering additional financial services sectors and broader markets across North America and Europe.
9. What has been the most significant challenge or regret in your journey as the founder of Daizy, and how did you overcome it?
Deborah Yang: The important thing is to build an agile organization that can pivot and fail quickly and succeed at the right pace. We pivoted early on from consumer-focused to B2B but leveraged all the automated AI investment insight RAG tools we built for Generative AI Agents. The critical thing is to keep your ego and hubris in check, as well as ask and listen carefully to client feedback. Having trusted customer partners is critical early on, and we had the good fortune to work with like-minded strategic partners such as TCW (Trust Company of the West) on building AI Agent pilots together. Our relationship has continued to grow as we have expanded our client base significantly.
10. How do you stay ahead of market trends to ensure Daizy remains at the forefront of innovation?
Deborah Yang: As AI Agents have emerged, it’s critical for Daizy to build a category serving financial services. To become a leader, it’s important to do your own AI research and contribute thought leadership. For example, I was recently invited to speak at EvidentAI with the heads of AI research at Goldman and UBS, and those conversations with the large audience have continued to build. Sharing case studies with the client community and generating newer ideas is also essential to building a sustainable future growth model. There is, however, no single way to stay ahead of market trends. We keep an eye on both our competitors and agentic players in other industries. We must liaise with the academic world and practitioners for leading-edge thinking. And most importantly, we spend time actually trying new ideas with trusted commercial partners.
11. What does success mean to you, and what are your aspirations for Daizy in the coming years?
Deborah Yang: Customer satisfaction is the top priority in our business. We have built AI Agents that are demanded and commercially supported by our clients rather than building bigger and bigger models that feed our personal ego. This can be measured by their willingness to pay us more over time as a trusted partner. This can only be achieved by a positive customer-first culture built on trust and excellence in client success as our firm’s core principle.
12. What does a typical day look like for you as the CEO of Daizy?
Deborah Yang: For me, it’s mostly about making the right headspace for Clarity of Thought. First thing in the morning, I clear my mind and ask myself, “What is working, and what is not working? And how can I move the needle today?” This guides me to prioritize our business goals and my actions and guides the message I send through the organization. Then, I think deeply while truly listening to the leaders to align across the entire organization, balancing the long and short-term objectives.
Editor’s Note
Deborah Yang isn’t just adding AI to finance—she’s redefining how the industry handles compliance and insights. Daizy’s AI Agents don’t replace professionals; they make them faster, more efficient, and more strategic. With automation built for financial services, she’s proving that AI can do the heavy lifting without sacrificing accuracy.
